Hasil untuk "Fossil man. Human paleontology"

Luis Fernando Tapia-García

Palaeontology in the state of Aguascalientes (México) has an extensive history dating back to 1799. However, it was not until the 1950s that Oswaldo Mooser began to formally describe the palaeontological biodiversity of the state, together with other palaeontologists such as Walter W. Dalquest, with whom he even described multiple new species from local discoveries. Much of the fossil material collected by Mooser was donated to different scientific collections, but the location of several specimens was never specified, and they were lost for decades, including holotypes. Bibliographic sources were consulted to trace the location of part of the Mooser’s collection. A total of four local, national, and foreign institutions were consulted to examine the palaeontological material, and a compilation of various fossils collected by Mooser in Aguascalientes was made, resulting in 76 original specimens of which nine are holotypes. Additional bibliographic sources were used to describe and reassess some specimens that had not been properly evaluated before. Previously published information of the fossil material was complemented, and the anatomical description of some specimens is also presented for the first time. Twenty new reports of unpublished fossils collected by Mooser are addressed in this work. The data obtained have implications for the evaluation of the examined taxa, as the specimens documented in this study still require intensive and specific analyses that cover aspects of their systematics, evolution, ecology, and natural history. Thus, the present work aims to serve as a basis for future palaeontological studies.

Michał Wawer, Jarosław A. Chudziak

When LLM-based multi-agent systems disagree, current practice treats this as noise to be resolved through consensus. We propose it can be signal. We focus on hate speech moderation, a domain where judgments depend on cultural context and individual value weightings, producing high legitimate disagreement among human annotators. We hypothesize that convergent disagreement, where agents reason similarly but conclude differently, indicates genuine value pluralism that humans also struggle to resolve. Using the Measuring Hate Speech corpus, we embed reasoning traces from five perspective-differentiated agents and classify disagreement patterns using a four-category taxonomy based on reasoning similarity and conclusion agreement. We find that raw reasoning divergence weakly predicts human annotator conflict, but the structure of agent discord carries additional signal: cases where agents agree on a verdict show markedly lower human disagreement than cases where they do not, with large effect sizes (d>0.8) surviving correction for multiple comparisons. Our taxonomy-based ordering correlates with human disagreement patterns. These preliminary findings motivate a shift from consensus-seeking to uncertainty-surfacing multi-agent design, where disagreement structure - not magnitude - guides when human judgment is needed.

Yuchen Liu, Lino Lerch, Luigi Palmieri et al.

Predicting human behavior in shared environments is crucial for safe and efficient human-robot interaction. Traditional data-driven methods to that end are pre-trained on domain-specific datasets, activity types, and prediction horizons. In contrast, the recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) promise open-ended cross-domain generalization to describe various human activities and make predictions in any context. In particular, Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) are able to integrate information from various sources, achieving more contextual awareness and improved scene understanding. The difficulty in applying general-purpose MLLMs directly for prediction stems from their limited capacity for processing large input sequences, sensitivity to prompt design, and expensive fine-tuning. In this paper, we present a systematic analysis of applying pre-trained MLLMs for context-aware human behavior prediction. To this end, we introduce a modular multimodal human activity prediction framework that allows us to benchmark various MLLMs, input variations, In-Context Learning (ICL), and autoregressive techniques. Our evaluation indicates that the best-performing framework configuration is able to reach 92.8% semantic similarity and 66.1% exact label accuracy in predicting human behaviors in the target frame.

Florian Mai, David Kaczér, Nicholas Kluge Corrêa et al.

Two core challenges of alignment are 1) scalable oversight and 2) accounting for the dynamic nature of human values. While solutions like recursive reward modeling address 1), they do not simultaneously account for 2). We sketch a roadmap for a novel algorithmic framework that trains a superhuman reasoning model to decompose complex tasks into subtasks that are still amenable to human-level guidance. Our approach relies on what we call the part-to-complete generalization hypothesis, which states that the alignment of subtask solutions generalizes to the alignment of complete solutions. We advocate for the need to measure this generalization and propose ways to improve it in the future.

Katie Seaborn

Social identity theory (SIT) and social categorization theory (SCT) are two facets of the social identity approach (SIA) to understanding social phenomena. SIT and SCT are models that describe and explain how people interact with one another socially, connecting the individual to the group through an understanding of underlying psychological mechanisms and intergroup behaviour. SIT, originally developed in the 1970s, and SCT, a later, more general offshoot, have been broadly applied to a range of social phenomena among people. The rise of increasingly social machines embedded in daily life has spurned efforts on understanding whether and how artificial agents can and do participate in SIA activities. As agents like social robots and chatbots powered by sophisticated large language models (LLMs) advance, understanding the real and potential roles of these technologies as social entities is crucial. Here, I provide a primer on SIA and extrapolate, through case studies and imagined examples, how SIT and SCT can apply to artificial social agents. I emphasize that not all human models and sub-theories will apply. I further argue that, given the emerging competence of these machines and our tendency to be taken in by them, we experts may need to don the hat of the uncanny killjoy, for our own good.

Pablo Joaquín Alonso-Muruaga, Luis Sebastián Saade, Gonzalo Gabriel Bravo et al.

Paleoenvironmental and paleoecological aspects of the Río Loro Formation (Paleogene, northwestern Argentina) were analyzed. In the type locality, four main sedimentary facies were recognized. Facies 1 (coarse-grained to pebbly amalgamated sandstones) record sedimentation in braided channels. Facies 2 (structureless to faintly laminated mudstones) and Facies 3 (interbedded mudstones with sandstones) are ascribed to deposition in distal to proximal floodplain settings, respectively. Facies 4 (coarse to medium-grained sandstone) is interpreted as deposited in meandering channels. Insect trace fossils, ascribed to nesting structures, were recognised particularly in facies 1 and 4. The recognized facies were grouped in a main facies association which allows interpretating a deposition in a complex multi-channel fluvial system with relatively stable muddy floodplain areas. Within this system, seasonal humid to dryer conditions favored biota substrate colonization and soil-forming processes. Well-preserved mammalian and reptilian remains were recognized in sandy mudstone deposits of Facies 3, showing low weathering stages (mainly stages 1 and 2) and the absence of signs of abrasion. These aspects, along with the presence of some articulated remains and their integration with the paleoenvironmental framework, suggest that skeletal pieces suffered an early burial after partial disarticulation, possibly by splays during major floods. The inferred habits of some of the taxa recorded are consistent with proximity to freshwater sources, vegetated areas, and seasonality. This multidisciplinary approach contributes to the understanding of paleoenvironmental and paleontological attributes of the Río Loro Formation and represents a basis for future surveys on this unit and its remarkable fossil record.

Katarína Holcová, Matic Rifl, Jozef Michalík

The first calcareous nannoplankton extinction and recovery close to the Triassic/Jurassic boundary (TJB) were studied in two Tatra Mountains sections of Kardolína and Furkaska. The studied sediments were deposited in an intra-shelf depression of the Tethyan shelf (the Zliechov Basin). Rare nannofossil assemblages were discovered in both sections. Rhaetian nannofossils are characterized by the dominance of Prinsiosphaera triassica and by episodic increases in the abundance of small-sized coccoliths. Coccoliths belonging to Calyculus? kardolinae sp. nov. were found on tops of the bedding planes. Triassic index species Eoconusphaera aff. hallstattensis was also recovered, it is rare though, probably due to the marginal or relatively high-latitudinal position of the area. The uppermost Triassic is characterized by a significant reduction in nannofossil abundance accompanied by the presence of organic matter in the rock, which was significant especially in the Kardolína section. The signal of the last occurrence of Prinsiosphaera triassica is overwritten by the reworking of Upper Triassic material into Jurassic strata within the boundary clay interval. The presence of representatives of Watznaueriaceae in the Jurassic Kopieniec Formation is surprising and might indicate hiatus in the TJB in the studied sections. We are also presenting the results of a newly developed method for the extraction of calcareous nannofossils from indurated rocks.

Thomas Laville, Petra Lukeneder, Alexander Lukeneder

Known for over 140 years, the Upper Triassic Polzberg Konservat-Lagerstätte is an exceptional early Carnian marine assemblage discovered in the Northern Calcareous Alps of Lower Austria. The Polzberg biota is composed of a diverse marine fauna, including two species of thylacocephalans, an enigmatic group of fossil euarthropods that was highly diversified during the Triassic and thus representing a major component of many marine faunas throughout the Triassic. Recent excavations at the Polzberg lead to the discovery of new thylacocephalan specimens. In this study, we examine in detail this new thylacocephalan material as well as the type material. Four thylacocephalan taxa are now reported from the Polzberg Biota, making it one of the most diverse faunas from the Late Triassic. Paraostenia striata nov. comb., which was previously assigned to Austriocaris and later to Atropicaris, and Paraostenia cf. ambatolokobensis correspond to the first mention of Paraostenia in the Late Triassic. A new taxon, Atropicaris? sp, is reported for the first time from Polzberg. In addition, the presence of gills and muscles of the posterior trunk in Austriocaris carinata and Paraostenia cf. ambatolokobensis is the first trace of soft tissue preservation in Polzberg thylacocephalans. Additionally, we discuss the similarities of the Polzberg thylacocephalan fauna with other Triassic and Jurassic faunas. It shows great similarity with the Late Triassic Kozja dnina fauna, but also more surprisingly with the Middle Jurassic La Voulte fauna. This can be explained by the connection between the Neotethys and the Alpine Tethys during the Early Jurassic.

Pavel Barták, Martin Ivanov, Eva Tihlaříková et al.

The lacustrine coal deposits at Nýřany, Czech Republic, yielded a diversified vertebrate assemblage of the Middle Pennsylvanian (Moscovian) age, represented by the remains of early tetrapods, as well as numerous freshwater ichthyofauna, including xenacanthiform sharks, acanthodians, dipnoans, and ray-finned fishes. However, unlike some other upper Carboniferous localities, the actinopterygian diversity is limited to the three small-bodied species, most of them endemic to Nýřany locality and the equivalent strata elsewhere, indicating that the true taxonomic diversity of the group at the locality may be biased. Here we describe first skeletal remains of large actinopterygian fishes from the site, including a new genus and species, Stambergichthys macrodens gen. et sp. nov., which is represented by a well-preserved mandible with teeth. The micro-computed tomographic techniques revealed in the specimen a presence of a complex neurovascular system innerving the teeth and the jaw, and supplying both with blood vessels. The dentition consists of a single row of massive, homodont, conical teeth, which possess simplexodont plicidentine on their base, the characteristics supporting the predatory ecology of the new species. The isolated skeletal remains of large-bodied actinopterygians expand the knowledge on the diversity of the group in Nýřany, and their occurrence in coal deposits of relatively shallow lake indicates they represent allochthonous, poorly known aquatic vertebrate association, likely originating from the braided river system. These findings underline the importance of less complete skeletal materials occurring in wellknown vertebrate assemblages of the upper Carboniferous coal-bearing localities.

Angélica Ballesteros-Prada, Isabel Vilanova, Mariel Luengo et al.

The effect of Holocene sea-level changes and their impact on coastal environments have been well-preserved in different places worldwide. Several studies along the Argentine coastal margin have contributed to understanding the extent and magnitude of the marine ingression occurred during the Mid–Holocene Highstand and its effect on ecosystems. In this research, we present a benthic foraminiferal fauna analysis of an outcrop located in Samborombón Bay, Argentina, with the aim to evaluate the maximum extent of the Holocene marine transgression in the middle zone of the bay. Along the sedimentary section, Cribroelphidium poeyanum, Cribroelphidium gunteri, Ammonia tepida, Elphidium galvestonense, and Ammonia parkinsoniana were the most representative species, while Quinqueloculina milletti and Haynesina germanica were represented in less proportion in some levels. This assemblage indicates that the study area represents a marine marginal environment with brackish conditions between 6,261–5,919 cal. years BP and 1,725– 1,511 cal. years BP. However, the diversity and abundance of the foraminiferal fauna reveals the transition from a shallow estuarine environment (6,261–5,919 cal. years BP) to a brackish marsh environment with floodable depressions and greater freshwater influence (1,725–1,511 cal. years BP). These changes are related not only to regressive and transgressive events that occurred during the Holocene, but also to the climatic, oceanographic, hydrological, and geomorphological characteristics of the middle zone of the Samborombón Bay.

Min Zhu, You-an Zhu, Z. Gai et al.

Martín Ubilla, Daniel Perea

Se proporciona una breve síntesis crítica en relación a estudios seleccionados de vertebrados continentales cuaternarios de Uruguay. su conocimiento se ha visto muy incrementado en diversidad del grupo dominante en el registro—los mamíferos—pero también en el de varios grupos de aves. El control temporal tiene en cuenta el esquema cronoestratigráfico propuesto para la región pampeana como herramienta de correlación bioestratigráfica y por un creciente número de edades numéricas (radiocarbono, luminiscencia ópticamente estimulada). Los sedimentos en el norte de Uruguay, Formación sopas, exhiben un rico y variado contenido fosilífero. se correlaciona con el Piso/Edad Lujanense y las edades numéricas de varios afloramientos se incluyen en el rango del Piso Marino Isotópico 3 (MIs 3). Los vertebrados sugieren diversos tipos de ambientes tales como cuerpos de agua dulce con importante desarrollo, floresta riparia, floresta semiabierta y áreas abiertas, no descartándose microambientes áridos y semiáridos. En el sur de Uruguay, se expresa la Formación Dolores, correlacionada con el Lujanense y con edades numéricas preponderantemente en el rango que incluye al Ultimo Máximo Glacial y Holoceno Temprano. Condiciones de aridez o semiaridez favorecidas por las condiciones frías del Ultimo máximo Glacial explican la presencia de algunos mamíferos que actualmente no viven en Uruguay. En barrancas costeras del Río de la Plata (sur-oeste de Uruguay), aflora la Formación Raigón, considerada de edad pliocena, pero con elementos que indican Pleistoceno Temprano y Medio (mamíferos y edades de luminiscencia ópticamente estimulada en facies terminales). Los mamíferos referidos al Pleistoceno sugieren contextos ambientales abiertos a semiabiertos tanto en base a sus adaptaciones dentarias como a estudios isotópicos. 2.11.0.0 2.11.0.0 2.11.0.0

Francisco J. Goin, Martín de los Reyes

Se describe a Lutreolina tonnii sp. nov. (Mammalia, Metatheria, Marsupialia, Didelphimorphia, Didelphidae) procedente de niveles del Pleistoceno Temprano (o Temprano–Medio) de las barrancas costeras de los alrededores de Necochea, Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina. El holotipo, un maxilar derecho con los M1-3, se destaca por su gran tamaño comparado con el de las otras especies, fósiles y vivientes, del género. Difiere también de las restantes especies del género en que los protoconos de los molares superiores están más comprimidos anteroposteriormente. Difiere de las especies vivientes en que el contacto maxilo-yugal es menos horizontal en sus dos tercios posteriores, existe un ectoflexo más profundo en el M3, y en que los M1-3 tienen una cresta interna baja pero diferenciada que conecta las bases de las cúspides estilares B y D. La nueva especie es la cuarta forma extinta hasta ahora conocida para el registro sudamericano y la tercera para el Plio–Pleistoceno de la Región Pampeana, indicando una considerable diversidad para el género hacia fines de la Era Cenozoica en las latitudes medias del continente.

Ran Tian, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Anca Dragan et al.

Humans have internal models of robots (like their physical capabilities), the world (like what will happen next), and their tasks (like a preferred goal). However, human internal models are not always perfect: for example, it is easy to underestimate a robot's inertia. Nevertheless, these models change and improve over time as humans gather more experience. Interestingly, robot actions influence what this experience is, and therefore influence how people's internal models change. In this work we take a step towards enabling robots to understand the influence they have, leverage it to better assist people, and help human models more quickly align with reality. Our key idea is to model the human's learning as a nonlinear dynamical system which evolves the human's internal model given new observations. We formulate a novel optimization problem to infer the human's learning dynamics from demonstrations that naturally exhibit human learning. We then formalize how robots can influence human learning by embedding the human's learning dynamics model into the robot planning problem. Although our formulations provide concrete problem statements, they are intractable to solve in full generality. We contribute an approximation that sacrifices the complexity of the human internal models we can represent, but enables robots to learn the nonlinear dynamics of these internal models. We evaluate our inference and planning methods in a suite of simulated environments and an in-person user study, where a 7DOF robotic arm teaches participants to be better teleoperators. While influencing human learning remains an open problem, our results demonstrate that this influence is possible and can be helpful in real human-robot interaction.

Viktor Kewenig, Andrew Lampinen, Samuel A. Nastase et al.

The potential of multimodal generative artificial intelligence (mAI) to replicate human grounded language understanding, including the pragmatic, context-rich aspects of communication, remains to be clarified. Humans are known to use salient multimodal features, such as visual cues, to facilitate the processing of upcoming words. Correspondingly, multimodal computational models can integrate visual and linguistic data using a visual attention mechanism to assign next-word probabilities. To test whether these processes align, we tasked both human participants (N = 200) as well as several state-of-the-art computational models with evaluating the predictability of forthcoming words after viewing short audio-only or audio-visual clips with speech. During the task, the model's attention weights were recorded and human attention was indexed via eye tracking. Results show that predictability estimates from humans aligned more closely with scores generated from multimodal models vs. their unimodal counterparts. Furthermore, including an attention mechanism doubled alignment with human judgments when visual and linguistic context facilitated predictions. In these cases, the model's attention patches and human eye tracking significantly overlapped. Our results indicate that improved modeling of naturalistic language processing in mAI does not merely depend on training diet but can be driven by multimodality in combination with attention-based architectures. Humans and computational models alike can leverage the predictive constraints of multimodal information by attending to relevant features in the input.

Bertram F. Malle, Daniel Ullman

We describe the steps of developing the MDMT (Multi-Dimensional Measure of Trust), an intuitive self-report measure of perceived trustworthiness of various agents (human, robot, animal). We summarize the evidence that led to the original four-dimensional form (v1) and to the most recent five-dimensional form (v2). We examine the measure's strengths and limitations and point to further necessary validations.

Meriam Moujahid, David A. Robb, Christian Dondrup et al.

Social Robots in human environments need to be able to reason about their physical surroundings while interacting with people. Furthermore, human proxemics behaviours around robots can indicate how people perceive the robots and can inform robot personality and interaction design. Here, we introduce Charlie, a situated robot receptionist that can interact with people using verbal and non-verbal communication in a dynamic environment, where users might enter or leave the scene at any time. The robot receptionist is stationary and cannot navigate. Therefore, people have full control over their personal space as they are the ones approaching the robot. We investigated the influence of different apparent robot personalities on the proxemics behaviours of the humans. The results indicate that different types of robot personalities, specifically introversion and extroversion, can influence human proxemics behaviours. Participants maintained shorter distances with the introvert robot receptionist, compared to the extrovert robot. Interestingly, we observed that human-robot proxemics were not the same as typical human-human interpersonal distances, as defined in the literature. We therefore propose new proxemics zones for human-robot interaction.

Takahiro Yabe, Kota Tsubouchi, Toru Shimizu et al.

Modeling and predicting human mobility trajectories in urban areas is an essential task for various applications. The recent availability of large-scale human movement data collected from mobile devices have enabled the development of complex human mobility prediction models. However, human mobility prediction methods are often trained and tested on different datasets, due to the lack of open-source large-scale human mobility datasets amid privacy concerns, posing a challenge towards conducting fair performance comparisons between methods. To this end, we created an open-source, anonymized, metropolitan scale, and longitudinal (90 days) dataset of 100,000 individuals' human mobility trajectories, using mobile phone location data. The location pings are spatially and temporally discretized, and the metropolitan area is undisclosed to protect users' privacy. The 90-day period is composed of 75 days of business-as-usual and 15 days during an emergency. To promote the use of the dataset, we will host a human mobility prediction data challenge (`HuMob Challenge 2023') using the human mobility dataset, which will be held in conjunction with ACM SIGSPATIAL 2023.

Adarsh Thakkar, Jaypalsinh M. Jadeja, S. Rajesh et al.

Jesús M. Torres, C. Borja, L. Gibert et al.

Simple Summary Two independent research groups led by Olivares (Spain) and Lowenstein (USA) investigated the immunological reactions of proteins extracted from the controversial Orce skull (VM-0), a 1.3-million-year-old fossil found at the Venta Micena site in Orce, Granada (Spain) and initially believed to come from an unidentified hominin. Work by both groups with polyclonal and monoclonal antibodies showed that proteins from this fossil reacted most strongly to antibodies against modern human proteins. Other hominin and mammal fossils from Venta Micena were also studied. Abstract Proteomics methods can identify amino acid sequences in fossil proteins, thus making it possible to determine the ascription or proximity of a fossil to other species. Before mass spectrometry was used to study fossil proteins, earlier studies used antibodies to recognize their sequences. Lowenstein and colleagues, at the University of San Francisco, pioneered the identification of fossil proteins with immunological methods. His group, together with Olivares’s group at the University of Granada, studied the immunological reactions of proteins from the controversial Orce skull fragment (VM-0), a 1.3-million-year-old fossil found at the Venta Micena site in Orce (Granada province, southern Spain) and initially assigned to a hominin. However, discrepancies regarding the morphological features of the internal face of the fossil raised doubts about this ascription. In this article, we review the immunological analysis of the proteins extracted from VM-0 and other Venta Micena fossils assigned to hominins and to other mammals, and explain how these methods helped to determine the species specificity of these fossils and resolve paleontological controversies.